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Publication Details
AFRICAN RESEARCH NEXUS
SHINING A SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAN RESEARCH
agricultural and biological sciences
Hiking trails as conduits for the spread of non-native species in mountain areas
Biological Invasions, Volume 22, No. 3, Year 2020
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Description
Roadsides are major pathways of plant invasions in mountain regions. However, the increasing importance of tourism may also turn hiking trails into conduits of non-native plant spread to remote mountain landscapes. Here, we evaluated the importance of such trails for plant invasion in five protected mountain areas of southern central Chile. We therefore sampled native and non-native species along 17 trails and in the adjacent undisturbed vegetation. We analyzed whether the number and cover of non-native species in local plant assemblages is related to distance to trail and a number of additional variables that characterize the abiotic and biotic environment as well as the usage of the trail. We found that non-native species at higher elevations are a subset of the lowland source pool and that their number and cover decreases with increasing elevation and with distance to trails, although this latter variable only explained 4–8% of the variation in the data. In addition, non-native richness and cover were positively correlated with signs of livestock presence but negatively with the presence of intact forest vegetation. These results suggest that, at least in the region studied, hiking trails have indeed fostered non-native species spread to higher elevations, although less efficiently than roadsides. As a corollary, appropriate planning and management of trails could become increasingly important to control plant invasions into mountains in a world which is warming and where visitation and recreational use of mountainous areas is expected to increase. © 2019, The Author(s).
Authors & Co-Authors
Barros, Ana Agustina
Argentina, Mendoza
Instituto Argentino de Nivologia, Glaciologia y Ciencias Ambientales
Essl, Franz
Austria, Vienna
Universität Wien
Lembrechts, Jonas J.
Belgium, Antwerpen
Universiteit Antwerpen
Wedegärtner, Ronja Elisabeth Magdalene
Norway, Trondheim
Norges Teknisk-naturvitenskapelige Universitet
Pauchard, Aníbal
Chile, Biobio
Universidad de Concepcion
Chile, Santiago
Instituto de Ecología y Biodiversidad
Dullinger, Stefan
Austria, Vienna
Universität Wien
Statistics
Citations: 38
Authors: 6
Affiliations: 6
Identifiers
Doi:
10.1007/s10530-019-02165-9
ISSN:
13873547